Friday, September 6, 2013

You won't find it on TV and it's occurring in the middle of a desert wasteland, but there is apparently a game on Saturday. BTN2GO will be showing the game, so you can watch on your computer or if you're extra fancy like me you'll plug your laptop into your TV for maximum enjoyment.

Unless you've medicated away the memory, and lord knows we've all tried, you remember the Gophers lost 28-21 to these same Aggies at TCF in 2011. This was Jerry Kill's second game as the Gophers' head coach after coming off of a hard fought game at USC the week prior.

New Mexico State is the #150 college football team in the country according to Sagarin rankings. Despite that, they do have a blog! Cruces Sports has 5 keys for the game on Saturday. In summary, the keys are that the Gophers need to suck and the Aggies need to pull a second horseshoe out of their collective ass to get the win. Sure, there's other stuff about running games and defense and stuff; but really it would take a colossal screw up for the Gophers to blow this one. Am I setting myself up for ultimate disappoint and taunting the jinx monsters by saying this? You bet I am.

New Mexico State took on Texas last week and received a 56-7 whipping. Senior QB Andrew McDonald actually had an OK game going 32-46 for 242 with 1 TD and 1 INT. He also ran for 50 yards and was their leading rusher. Senior RB Germi Morrison only got 25 yards on 12 carries. They actually led early in the first quarter 7-0. I bet that was neat for them. "Hey, we're beating Texas!" Then, *freight train* happened. Texas had 4 scores of 50+ yards; 3 of them through the air.

Besides McDonald and Germi, other notables are WR Joshua Bowen, LT Davonte Wallace and LB Bryan Bonilla (couldn't find evidence of relation to Bobby, although Bobby has a son named Brandon that is a pitcher for ASU).

The aforementioned blogger in Las Cruces has a 38-24 Gopher win projected which sounds about right to me. The secondary will be challenged again with a senior QB throwing a bunch of passes, so big plays will be important -- both creating them for the Gophers and stopping the Aggies. I would love to see a wide receiver step up in this game as Engel kind of pissed me off when I reviewed the game this week. If Engel makes a couple of plays against UNLV, maybe my Nelson passing ulcer would have shrunk a little. That was game #1 though and improvement can happen. No really, I've seen it.